The head of Germany’s competition regulator says Artificial Intelligence might increase the power of Big Tech.
Andreas Mundt, who heads up the German agency, has warned the increasing technology could up the dominance of huge companies like Microsoft and Alphabet - the parent company of Google - as they gear up to hone their own capabilities in the sector, following the huge success of OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT.
He said: "For us as a competition authority, it is crucial that this new technology does not further strengthen the dominance of the large corporations.
"The danger is very great because you need two things above all for AI, powerful servers and vast amounts of data. Big internet corporations have both.”
Andreas believes the area was still ready for other competitors to enter the market but regulation needed to be put in place to make sure it could thrive under the might of already huge actors
He said: “However, models from smaller providers could also become so popular that they develop in the direction of a kind of operating system, a new platform.
"Both developments are possible, and as an authority we have to be careful that any competitive potential is not buried from the outset."
This comes amid the lead-up to the first AI summit hosted by the UK’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, which will see world leaders come together to attempt to come up with a framework to limit the power of the tech, which poses huge threats to job market, issues around copyright and both misinformation and disinformation.
Matt Clifford, the Prime Minister’s Representative for the AI Safety Summit posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, saying: “It’s not about setting up a single new international institution. Our view is that most countries will want to develop their own capabilities in this space, particularly to evaluate frontier models.”
